She stands on the stairs, thinking of his bare, freckled arms wrapped around her, his sleeping face on her pillow. It had been perfect. Perfect. A small voice wonders whether one day, if only he’d think about it hard enough, he’ll realize that their whole life could be like that.
It’s a short taxi ride to the post office in Langley Street. Before she leaves the office, she takes care to tell Melissa’s secretary. “Here is my mobile number, if she wants me,” she says, her voice dripping with professional courtesy. “I’ll be about an hour.”
Although it’s lunchtime, the post office isn’t busy. She walks to the front of the nonexistent queue and waits obediently for the electronic voice to call, “Till number four, please.”
“Can I talk to someone about PO boxes, please?”
“Hang on.” The woman disappears, then reemerges, pointing for her to move to the end, where there is a door. “Margie will meet you down there.”
A young woman sticks her head around the door. She’s wearing a name tag, a large gold chain with a crucifix, and a pair of heels so high that Ellie wonders how she can bear to stand in them, let alone spend a whole day working in them. She smiles, and Ellie thinks briefly how rare it is that anyone smiles at you in the city anymore.
“This is going to sound a little strange,” Ellie begins, “but is there a way of finding out who rented a PO box years ago?”
“They can change pretty frequently. When are you talking about?” Ellie wonders how much to tell her, but Margie has a nice face, so she adopts her confidential tone. She reaches into her bag and pulls out the letters, carefully enclosed in a clear plastic folder. “It’s a bit of a strange one. It’s some love letters I found. They’re addressed to a PO box here, and I want to return them.”
She has Margie’s interest. It’s probably a nice change from benefit payments and catalog returns.
“PO box thirteen.” Ellie points at the envelope.
Margie’s face reveals recognition. “Thirteen?”
“You know the one?”
“Oh, yes.” Margie’s lips are compressed, as if she’s considering how much she’s allowed to say. “Apart from a short break, that PO box has been held by the same person for, ooh, almost forty years. Not that that’s particularly unusual in itself.”
“So what is?”
“The fact that it’s never had a letter. Not one. We’ve contacted the holder lots of times to give her the chance to shut it down. She says she wants to keep it open. We say it’s up to her if she wants to waste her money.” She peers at the letter. “Love letter, is it? Oh, how sad.”
“Can you give me her name?” Ellie’s stomach tenses. This could be a better story even than she’d envisaged.
The woman shakes her head. “Sorry, I can’t. Data protection and all that.”
“Oh, please!” She thinks of Melissa’s face if she can come back with a Forbidden Love That Lasted Forty Years. “Please. You have no idea how important this is to me.”
“Sorry, I really am, but it could cost me more than my job.”
Ellie swears under her breath and glances behind her at the queue that has suddenly appeared. Margie is turning back to her door.
“Thank you anyway,” Ellie says, remembering her manners.
“No problem.” Behind them a small child is crying, trying to escape from the restraints of its pram.
“Hang on.” Ellie’s rustling in her bag.
“Yes?”
She grins. “Could I—you know—leave a letter in it?”
Dear Jennifer,
Please excuse the intrusion, but I have come across some personal correspondence that I believe may be yours, and I’d welcome the opportunity to return it to you.
I can be contacted on the numbers below.
Yours sincerely,
Ellie Haworth
Rory looks at it. They’re sitting at the pub across from the Nation. It’s dark, even so early in the evening, and under the sodium lights green removal lorries are still visible outside the front gate, men in overalls traveling backward and forward up the wide steps to the Nation’s entrance. They have been an almost permanent fixture for weeks now.
“What? You think I’ve got the tone wrong?”
“No.” He’s sitting beside her on the banquette, one foot angled against the table leg in front of them.
“What, then? You’re doing that thing with your face.”
He grins. “I don’t know, don’t ask me. I’m not a journalist.”
“Come on. What does the face mean?”
“Well, doesn’t it make you feel a bit . . .”
“What?”
“I don’t know . . . It’s so personal. And you’re going to be asking her to air her dirty linen in public.”
“She might be glad of the chance. She might find him again.” There’s a note of defiant optimism in her voice.
“Or she might be married, and they’ve spent forty years trying to get over her affair.”
“I doubt it. Anyway, how do you know it’s dirty linen? They might be together now. It might have had a happy ending.”
“And she kept the PO box open for forty years? It didn’t have a happy ending.” He hands back the letter. “She might even be mentally ill.”
“Oh, so holding a torch for someone means you’re mad. Obviously.”
“Keeping a PO box open for forty years, without getting a single letter in it, is on the far side of normal behavior.”
He has a point, she concedes. But the idea of Jenny and her empty PO box has taken hold of her imagination. More important, it’s the closest thing she has to a decent feature. “I’ll think about it,” she says. She doesn’t tell him she posted the good copy that afternoon.
“So,” he says, “did you have a good time last night? Not too sore today?”
“What?”
“The ice-skating.”
“Oh. A little.” She straightens her legs, feeling the tightness in her thighs, and reddens a little when she brushes his knee with her own. In-jokes have sprung up between them. She is Jayne Torvill; he is the humble librarian, there to do her bidding. He texts her with deliberate misspellings: Pls will the smart ladee com and hav a drink with the humble librarrian later?
“I heard you came down to find me.”
She glances at him, and he’s grinning again. She grimaces. “Your boss is so grumpy. Honestly. It was as if I’d asked him to sacrifice his firstborn when all I was doing was trying to get a message to you.”
“He’s all right,” Rory says, wrinkling his nose. “He’s just stressed. Really stressed. This is his last project before he retires, and he’s got forty thousand documents to move in the right order, plus the ones that are being scanned for digital storage.”
“We’re all busy, Rory.”
“He just wants to leave it shipshape. He’s old school—you know, everything’s for the good of the paper. I like him. He’s of a dying breed.”
She thinks of Melissa, she of the cold eyes and high heels, and cannot help but agree with him.
“He knows everything there is to know about this place. You should talk to him sometime.”
“Yes. Because he’s obviously taken such a shine to me.”
“I’m sure he would, if you asked him nicely.”
“Like I speak to you?”
“No. I said nicely.”
“Are you going to go for his job?”
“Me?” Rory lifts his glass to his lips. “Nah. I want to go traveling—South America. This was only meant to be a holiday job for me. Somehow I ended up staying eighteen months.”
“You’ve been here eighteen months?”
“You mean you hadn’t noticed me?” He makes a mock-hurt face, and she blushes again.
“I just . . . I thought I would have seen you before now.”
“Ah, you hacks only see what you want to see. We’re the invisible drones, there merely to fulfill your bidding.”
He’s smiling, and spoke without malice, but she knows there’s an unpleasant kernel of truth in what he said. “So I’m a selfish, uncaring hack, blind to the needs of the true workers and nasty to decent old men with a work ethic,” she muses.
“That’s about the size of it.” Then he looks at her properly, and his expression changes. “What are you going to do to redeem yourself?”
It’s astonishingly hard to meet his eye. She’s trying to work out how to answer when she hears her mobile phone. “Sorry,” she mutters, scrabbling in her bag. She clicks open the little envelope symbol.
Just wanted to say hi. Away hols tomorrow, will be in touch when I get back, take care Jx
She’s disappointed. “Say hi,” after the whispered intimacies of the previous evening? The uninhibited coming together? He wants to “say hi”?
She rereads the message. He never says much via the mobile phone, she knows that. He told her at the start it was too risky, in case his wife happened to pick it up before he could delete some incriminating message. And there’s something sweet in “take care,” isn’t there? He’s telling her he wants her to be okay. She wonders, even as she calms herself, at how far she stretches these messages, finding a whole hinterland in the sparse words he sends to her. She believes they’re so connected to each other that it’s fine, she understands what he really wants to say. But occasionally, like today, she doubts that there really is anything beyond the shorthand.
How to reply? She can hardly say “Have a good holiday” when she wants him to have a terrible time, his wife to get food poisoning, his children to whine incessantly, and the weather to fail spectacularly, confining them all to a grumpy indoors. She wants him to sit there missing her, missing her, missing her . . .
Take care yourself x
When she looks up, Rory’s eyes are fixed on the removals lorry outside, as if he’s pretending not to be interested in what’s going on beside him.
“Sorry,” she says, tucking her phone back into her bag. “Work thing.” Aware, even as she says it, why she’s not telling him the truth. He could be a friend, is already a friend: why would she not tell him about John?
“Why do you think nobody writes love letters like these anymore?” she says instead, pulling one from her bag. “I mean, yes, there are texts and e-mails and things, but nobody sends them in language like this, do they? Nobody spells it out anymore like our unknown lover did.”
The removal lorry has pulled away. The front of the newspaper building is blank and empty, its entrance a dark maw under the sodium lights, its remaining staff deep inside, making last-minute changes to the front page.
“Perhaps they do,” he says, and his face has lost that brief softness. “Or perhaps, if you’re a man, it’s impossible to know what you’re meant to say.”
The gym at Swiss Cottage is no longer near either of their homes, has equipment that is regularly out of order and a receptionist so bolshy that they wonder whether she’s been planted there by some opposition, but neither she nor Nicky can be bothered to go through the interminable process of ending their membership and finding somewhere new. It has become their weekly meeting place. After a few desultory laps up and down the small pool, they sit in the hot tub or the sauna for forty minutes to talk, having convinced themselves that these things are “good for the skin.”
Nicky arrives late: she’s preparing for a conference in South Africa and has been held up. Neither friend will pass comment on the other’s lateness: it’s accepted that this happens, that any inconvenience caused by one’s career is beyond reproach. Besides, Ellie has never quite understood what Nicky does.